Since the Spring Semester of 2007 is now well underway, I thought I’d take this time to highlight some new relationships with schools and arts organizations being explored under the guise of the Music-in-Education Guided Internship Program. We have several guided interns pursuing teaching opportunities within the Boston Public School system.

With thanks to George Simpson, we are developing a relationship with the Roland Hayes School (a middle school in Roxbury, near Roxbury Community College), where two of our MIE Guided Interns (Kathryn Wigger & Amanda Romano) will be teaching group harp lessons and coaching a lap harp ensemble. The Roland Hayes School is Boston’s first public school for music. It also serves students from the Madison Park Vocational High School and other nearby schools. A collection of lap, lever, and pedal harps were donated to the Boston Public School system several years ago, and the Hayes School has kept them since; these harps will be the basis of the MIE Guided Internship.

Also, this semester, our partnership continues with the Boston Arts Academy! Haruka Horii, one of our graduate students in the MIE Concentration is back to teach jazz improvisation and is also coaching a jazz string ensemble.

Graduate vocalist Jessica Reed, of the NEC Opera Program, is using her MIE Guided Internship to start an after school choir club at the Hurley Elementary School. Jessica is also the recipient of a NEC Performance Outreach Fellowship.

Finally, this semester is also seeing a reinstatement of internships hosted by National Public Radio’s “From The Top” (FtT) radio show. Bianca Garcia, a FtT alum and current NEC grad student, is helping FtT to design its outreach component such that FtT’s young alums receive training for future artist-residency opportunities.

There are, as always, a number of Guided Interns working in the MIE Research Center … but since most of them are also Documentation Specialists (and thus, NewsBloggers), I figured I’d focus on students whose guided internships are off-campus.

- Randy

Randy Wong is Program Coordinator for the Center for Music-in-Education and Information Architect for the Music-in-Education National Consortium

This post is intended to solicit some feedback for a thought that has been occurring to me while participating in Paul Burdick’s MIE course, “Performing Artists in Community Outreach.” Throughout the first three weeks of class I have become familiar with various definitions of what a ‘community’ is, but couldn’t help but notice that when one uses the term ‘outreach,’ it often only refers to select/few types of communities. These are primarily for schools and assisted living centers.

To me there are many reasons for this. For example, I can see these two types of communities as gaining the most enrichment from an outreach program, especially that of music. There is no doubt that lives are enhanced by what a performing artist can do in these venues. Beyond that I also see a need for outreach within these institutions. Schools need people to come in from the outside world to display an infinite amount of things that prove invaluable to students. Assisted living centers need our performances to among many other things provide an escape from the everyday. This is by no means an exhaustive list of what we as performing artists can and of course actually do at these facilities, but what about the other communities?

Most of the people on this planet are not in grade schools nor are they in assisted living centers? Do these people in the long mid-roads of their life not need enrichment and outreach the same way as our young and our elderly? Can they not benefit all the same or perhaps even more? Is there some way we can bring outreach to other communities, more regular communities, communities we have yet to think of? Yet to penetrate?

What do you think?

-Andy

Andy Stetson is an undergraduate trumpet performance major in his senior year at NEC. As an MIE Concentration student, Andy was the lead organizer for the 2006 Music-in-Education National Consortium conference held at NEC, and has written an article titled “Hands Across The Americas: Experiencing the Transformative Power of Music in Venezuela,” which will be published in the Inaugural Issue of the Journal for Music-in-Education, 2007.

I’m watching “Ice-T’s Rap School” on VH1 again. This time, the episode is putting its emphasis on the business/entrepreneurship aspects of being a hip-hop artist: show promoting, making business decisions, deciding what kind of music/rhymes are appropriate for a show, and also the social pressures that come with being an artist. Ice-T is confronting the students and trying to reinforce that he thinks that the quality of the music should reinforce how much effort the students put into their work.

I see Ice-T’s response as a real-world example of the need to look at student work from an objective point of view. In other words, if student work is at the center of the conversation, rather than the relationship the teacher has with the student or the context of the work (i.e. previous work the student has done), one can really pay attention to what the student is learning.

Harvard Project Zero researcher and Arts In Education program director Steve Seidel has done a lot of work in the area of how to evaluate student work, and in fact, we take a similar approach when evaluating MIE student portfolios. Seidel runs an occasional conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education known as ROUNDS, in which educators and researchers of different backgrounds come together to discuss student work and learn various conference protocols (the most “successful” of which is known as the Collaborative Assessment Conference) that Project Zero has developed to help facilitate reflective discussion.

Although Ice-T’s approach to evaluating his student’s work seems to be pretty effective, what I have noticed is that the show doesn’t really give the viewer much idea about what other students think about their peers performances or lyric writing. Because of the age of the students (middle school?), and the nature of the project (fairly informal), I suppose it might be awkward to show students engaging in lengthy reflective practices — though in the reality-cutaway sequences, we do see snippets of students reflecting on their work. We also see students practicing for their performances and engaging in both group and individual work. In a way, each episode ends up working as a mini-portfolio of Ice-T’s residency. [Note: Could this be a model for documenting internships? Perhaps... ] Anyways, this makes me wonder how a tool like Seidel’s Collaborative Assessment Conference could be used to help faciliate student reflection, and what effects it would have on student learning.

Finally, and on a separate note, I find myself raising the following questions (now that I’ve seen a couple episodes of the program):

Although ‘entertainment’ is probably what the main focus of Ice-T’s show is, I would urge other MIE advocates to look closely at the world that surrounds them, and see how they might find other environments or situations that could fit within the context of our world: though the field of music-in-education may seem specialized upon first glance, programs like “Ice-T’s Rap School” help to show how ubiquitous, and closely-connected, the world of interdisciplinary music education really is.

-Randy

The MIE Guided Internship Program at New England Conservatory is more than a resume-furthering, experience-garnering entry point into teaching. Through the MIE Research Center’s process for planning and evaluating student-initiated Guided Internships, Conservatory students find opportunities to explore the merits of action research, curriculum planning, data collection, and administrative responsibility.

In her article, “Crossing Boundaries: The Role of Higher Education in Professional Development with Arts Partnerships,” MIENC Site Director and educator Dr. Gail Burnaford writes:

We have found that Gardner’s four roles for students who are engaged in the arts (Gardner, 1973) are useful frameworks for professional development of teaching artists, music teachers, and classrooms teachers. The four roles, composer, audience member, critic, and performer give artists and teachers a frame or empty outline to use in order to ask the inquiry questions, “Why is the child doing this? What is she learning? What is he expressing? What did I as the teacher or artist do to help? What can I be doing next?” (Burnaford, 2003)

I would like to suggest that what Burnaford is describing is at the heart of MIE Guided Internships: that at any given point in time, Conservatory students conducting internships can pause from their work, and choose one of Gardner’s perspectives from which to analyze their work. That it’s in the synthesis of these types of roles, such as in the Artist-Teacher-Scholar model, from which the MIE Guided Internship takes form.

In my work (as MIE Program Coordinator) with current MIE students and recent alumni, I find myself explaining the merits of the Guided Internship Program from this very perspective. Even after students have completed their Internships, they can find ways of understanding their experience from x different role or persona, despite having focused their documentation (most often a process-portfolio) from the perspective of y. (This take-away is yet another reason why we, as MIE Faculty & Staff, are explicit about the importance of rich documentation in student work).

Burnaford goes on to write:

Teacher learning is the way in to student learning; teachers need to experience all four of those roles too. In a professional development context, teachers need to compose; teachers need to practice those roles — even music teachers, because they haven’t done that in the professiona setting all of the time.

Again, I wholeheartedly agree with Gail; and in fact, our MIE Guided Internship Program helps to support the point she is making. Larry Scripp sometimes refers to the Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework as being an entry-point into entrepreneurship, and the proof of this is in the Guided Internships that our students initiate. Some of our students’ more ambitious projects have included: Teaching Solfege via hip-hop beats; coaching (and arranging for) quartets of violin/viola/2 cellos; exploring connections between poetry and rhythms with kindergartens; and a whole host of students conducting various research projects in the MIE Research Center.

–Randy

I’m watching a show on VH1 called “Ice-T’s Rap School” and its premise parallels the mission of Music-in-Education in many ways. The show puts rapper Ice-T in a New York school, where he acts essentially as a MIE Teaching Artist: he designs his own curriculum, teaches regular classes, does some performing, and also attempts to integrate his lessons with material that students are already learning in other classes. Even in a 30 minute episode, I saw Ice-T work with students on many different levels: In one-on-one sessions to improve on the literary/rhyme elements of each student’s self-written lyrics; talking with students in a class setting about the moral and social implications of hip-hop & rap; modeling performance techniques; and working on the integration of rhyming and dance (and choreographing dance moves), just to name a few.

What’s most interesting to me about this show is that it seems to set itself aside from the whole “reality TV” thing by showing the entire learning process that Ice-T’s students have to go through. Whereas other shows might be content to focus their airtime on catfights between contestants, “Ice-T’s Rap School” stayed true to the educational aspect of the program. Furthermore, the popularity of the program, and its prominent place during weekday primetime (Thursday at 8:30pm) with a very famous artist, goes to show that Artist-Teacher-Scholars are indeed a part of the mainstream culture, whether we call them that or not.

As MIE Program Coordinator, I find myself explaining the merits of teaching artists and the Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework to many inquiring minds. And, until now, I often considered teaching artists to be on the fringe of the traditional model of what’s acceptable in public education. Seeing “Ice-T’s Rap School” has changed my mind: Clearly, Artist-Teacher-Scholars/Teaching Artists are not only acceptable for public education, but they are also at the forefront of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. I will be keeping an eye out for more examples of this in pop culture, and hopefully am also priming the pump for MIE to go primetime.

-Randy

We have currently had 6 classes and in these classes we have discussed everything from poetry to the average attention span of a 3rd grader. I found that I have the attention span of a 5th grader at times, especially when this class meets at thursday between 4 and 6. This past week we took a field trip to the South End Settlements, it is an old building that houses a pre-school program, before and after school program and a community arts center. In December our class will be performing for the after school program and we went to check out the performance space and the types of activities that occur there. While there we had to oppurtunity to watch an African Dance Class, where the emphasis was not perfection but movement and enjoyment. It gave the kids time to figure out what they were doing with gental instruction. We then walked through two classrooms where math and reading were being taught. Each group was no more than 10 students with 2 teachers/tutors. We learned the basics of how an after-school program is run, and was given time to look around the all purpose room. The last stop on our tour was the art center located next door. Inside we found the youngest group that the afterschool program has. They were finishing their pumpkin patch mural by cutting out silver stars and rocket ships. Our trip ended with some time of reflection where the class talked about the size of the program and how it was run. This trip was interesting and I am looking to discuss it further in class on thursday.

-Maggie

Each semester there are a number of students who choose to participate in either the MIE program or the Performance Outreach program here at New England Conservatory. However, what these students may not realize is that their work for either program can possibly count as credit for the other. For example, students who are awarded Performance Outreach Fellowships can often directly apply those experiences as Guided Internships.

-Randy

Violinist Erin Hauch used her Performance Outreach Fellowship as an MIE Guided Internship. Erin got MIE Internship credit for her Outreach work through her thorough use portfolio-based documentation. Her portfolio posed many questions about the work of Artist-Teacher-Scholars and she based her findings on her Guided Internship experiences.